Swedish retailer donates horsemeat to the homeless

One retailer has announced plans to donate its stocks of horsemeat-tainted lasagne to the homeless. Photo / AP

When horsemeat was discovered in foods across Europe this year, everything from packets of lasagne to tins of bolognese vanished from the shelves overnight, most of it destined for dumping as far away from the horrified customer as possible.

Not so in thrifty Sweden, where one retailer has announced plans to donate its stocks of horsemeat-tainted lasagne to the homeless.

Axfood said in a press release that it would start distributing about five tonnes of lasagne to the needy of St Clara Church in Stockholm from today. The group said many people had contacted it outraged that edible food would be going to waste.

While people in Britain are unaccustomed to horsemeat, it is eaten with gusto across Europe, with horsemeat butchers found in France, Switzerland and Belgium.

Sweden's food agency had given the go-ahead for the plan, the company said, as long as the labelling on the package made it clear exactly what the person was about to tuck into.

Axfood is not the first company to come up with a way of putting unwanted horsemeat to good use: in Germany, one company has announced its tainted lasagne will be turned into biogas.